DESCRIBE THE OBJECT
Drawing from the world of platformer games, this piece has three main objects. The rainbow circles, the grayscale squares and the lavender platforms. Based on these objects, occasionally the background of the piece will flash this shade of lavender. A burst of pink and purple in a sea of gray, contrasting with the usual teal. It’s so different, so sudden. It sticks out like a sore thumb, its strangeness. Its queerness.
DESCRIBE YOUR MOTIVATION IN CREATING THIS OBJECT
When introduced to the idea of duplicating an object, I realized that in some abstracted way, I could populate the piece. And this population is either in gray, of every shade of the rainbow at once. The rainbow is always there, not some sort of secret. But it’s the grayscale squares, the heteronormative culture, that produces the lavender flashes. Even though the rainbow is constant, the lavender is somehow still unexpected.
DESCRIBE YOUR PROCESS
The piece began by duplicating the circle and square objects, before adding the platforms that float around. The brightness of the circles and squares alters during each run of the draw function, to random values. This random value creates this feeling I described, of the population. An abstracted version of the human race and its societal norms and pressures. It creates the idea of more figures than those that are actually on the screen, as they alter every second.
WHAT DOES THE PROJECT MEAN TO YOU?
My upbringing taught me that queerness is something so sudden, something somehow traitorous to the very system I was a part of, something to be treated as wrong. I wanted to replicate the feeling of my queerness making itself known, the reaction of my own psyche to this treason. It went against everything I was taught, everything I believed.
